Are You a Firefighter or a Strategic Leader?

Hello everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thanks for tuning in.

I sat in on our bootcamp class last week. This is our first graduating class. It was pretty exciting. And the combination of
the two-year bootcamp education is strategic planning. You've heard Dennis and me and Bundy and everybody else talk
about how strategic planning is just so important for construction companies and what a difference maker it is. And so,
this is the grand finale. John stump leads the strategic planning course. He did a terrific job and the class was so engaged.
They were energized, enthusiastic. They grasped intuitively that a tool that can establish a small handful of top company
priorities, that codifies your mission, vision, and company values, that creates clear goals with deadlines and budgets and
accountability for people in the company. And that creates alignment throughout the organization. They just intuitively
grasped what a powerful tool that is.

And then here comes Wayne, the wet blanket and John Stump has them just walking on air, they're so excited. And, here
I come and just throw a wet blanket on the whole thing. And I talked about what it takes to really successfully execute a
strategic plan and the number is, and I'm sure I'm going to throw a wet blanket on your excitement too. A senior leader,
not all the senior leaders, but a senior leader in the company needs to devote about 50% of his or her time to implementing
and evangelizing the strategic plan. Especially if you haven't done one before, somebody really has to be the evangelist,
they have to talk about it. They have to talk about that vision, the mission, the values, they have to just talk about it until
they're blue in the face, until everybody around them is sick of hearing about it.

But somebody's got to take this concept, this 30,000-foot concept of a strategic plan and drive it down into weekly
execution, or it won't work. Or it won't work as designed anyway, it'll work overtime, but you won't have those immediate
benefits that you certainly want. So, the faces fell. You could see the look of dismay in their faces because they were
already working 60 or 80 hours a week. Now they have this challenge, this additional mountainous challenge of now I got
to devote 20, 30, 40 hours a week of my time which I don't have to getting this thing embedded into the organization. And
I kind of felt bad because they were so excited, but it's the reality. If you're going to do it, do it right, and make sure
somebody is in charge of driving this wisdom into the organization.

So, I found an article from chiefexecutive.net. It's a really good website. Every day they have something that comes out.
It mostly deals with public companies, but some of these lessons obviously applied to us in the construction business. So
according to this article, Don't be a firefighter, be a strategy leader, public company executives spend 44% of their time,
almost half on non-strategic activities. Now, what is that number for our members? We don't have a hard number. We
don't know for sure, but it's more than 44%. It's 94% or 99% of their time spent on non-strategic activities. So, if you're
going to do strategic planning, make sure you devote enough of your time to make sure the plan gets translated into the
company and gets implemented. So, they talk about three different types of activities that take away from that strategic
evangelism.

The first is the firefighter. Firefighters are turnaround artists, really kind of a chief operating officer in the company. Then
they talk about the implementer. The implementer is the person in charge of SOPs, policies, processes, things like that in
the company, doing things on time, on budget, et cetera. And then the counselor. The counselor's the person that listens
to everybody and acts like a counselor. Those are the three primary things that take time away from CEO's really devoting
their time and attention to strategic planning. So, they have one case study in here and they talk about a company they
examined and believe it or not, this company had 40 open initiatives, 40 initiatives in various stages of implementation.
Some hadn't been touched in years.

And so, what they did, they took that 40 and they consolidated it down to six initiatives. And then they began to implement
from there. And I still think six is too many. I mean, how can you hold six priorities in your mind simultaneously and focus
on each of them? It's really one or two. One, ideally. Two at the most. Six, ah, ah, that's too many. So, 40 initiatives,
obviously that's not going to work. Six initiatives, I'm skeptical about that. One, yes. Two, maybe on the outside. But what
the strategic planning did for this company and this example, and what it does for our members is it aligns and connects
the leaders, the employees, and your customers. And it aligns them directly to the company's mission, vision, and values,
the company's highest priorities and the things that differentiate you and your company from the competition.

The challenge in any big initiative, whether it's strategic planning or implementing Procor is somebody in senior leadership
has got to devote a ton of time to making sure that this initiative gets translated from 30,000 feet down to a weekly and
daily execution in the company.

Don't forget about bootcamp coming up October 21st. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thank you.